I just got some good news from Susan at Little Angels! Well, first she toyed with me and gave me the bad news: the national committee STILL didn’t hear our case in their meeting on Wednesday. Their backlog apparently goes back to last April. Susan heard of this at 9am on Wednesday, though, so she quickly wrote up another letter for the Little Angels committee that was also meeting on Wednesday afternoon. She listed out all the extra steps we did, the headache from the national committee, etc. And they did it! They approved Eden “clear for adoption” and approved us as able to adopt! It would have been nice if they had given us this approval 6 weeks ago…or even 4 weeks ago after we got the paperwork they asked for! I’m super happy they did approve us though, the backlog from the national committee is not looking so good.

Next Steps:
Our lawyer takes this letter to court next week and hopefully is seen on a Certificate of Urgency (2 days wait instead of 3 weeks). This first hearing is the appointment of a Guardian Ad Litem. This person is supposed to come visit and observe how amazingly wonderful we are with Eden, how she is thriving in our home, etc. We then have another court hearing 1-2 weeks after that where the guardian and a little angels’ social worker present their reports and (hopefully) the court grants the adoption. Its unclear if we have to go back to the national committee at that time or not. If we do, well, hopefully they’ve worked through their backlog! Worst case scenario is that we have to wait 3-4 weeks for the first visit, then 3-4 weeks for the second visit, then 4-8 weeks for the national committee…but thats where the humanitarian visa would come in: we could at least come back for a little bit to see Meghan/Andy/Gracie/family in the middle of all the waiting.